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5 April 2023: Astronomers using an array of ground- and space-based telescopes, including Gemini North on Hawai‘i, have uncovered a closely bound duo of energetic quasars — the hallmark of a pair of merging galaxies — seen when the Universe was only three billion years old. This discovery sheds light on the evolution of galaxies at “cosmic noon,” a period in the history of the Universe when galaxies underwent bursts of furious star formation. This merger also represents a system on the verge of becoming a giant elliptical galaxy.

28 September 2022: Astronomers may have discovered the ancient chemical remains of the first stars to light up the Universe. Using an innovative analysis of a distant quasar observed by the 8.1-meter Gemini North telescope on Hawai‘i, operated by NSF’s NOIRLab, the scientists found an unusual ratio of elements that, they argue, could only come from the debris produced by the all-consuming explosion of a 300-solar-mass first-generation star.

14 December 2021: Astronomers have made the most precise measurements yet of the motions of stars around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. These results, obtained with the help of the Gemini North telescope, show that 99.9% of the mass contained at the very center of the galaxy is due to the black hole, and only 0.1% could include stars, smaller black holes, interstellar dust and gas, or dark matter.

7 April 2021: Astronomers at Western University have discovered the most rapidly rotating brown dwarfs known. They found three brown dwarfs that each complete a full rotation roughly once every hour. That rate is so extreme that if these “failed stars” rotated any faster, they could come close to tearing themselves apart. Identified by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, the brown dwarfs were then studied by ground-based telescopes including Gemini North, which confirmed their surprisingly speedy rotation.

12 January 2021: The most distant quasar known has been discovered. The quasar, observed just 670 million years after the Big Bang, is 1000 times more luminous than the Milky Way. It is powered by the earliest known supermassive black hole, which weighs in at more than 1.6 billion times the mass of the Sun. Seen more than 13 billion years ago, this fully formed distant quasar is also the earliest yet discovered, providing astronomers with insight into the formation of massive galaxies in the early Universe. The result was released today at the January 2021 meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

24 November 2020: An international team of astronomers using Gemini North’s GNIRS instrument have discovered that CK Vulpeculae, first seen as a bright new star in 1670, is approximately five times farther away than previously thought. This makes the 1670 explosion of CK Vulpeculae much more energetic than previously estimated and puts it into a mysterious class of objects that are too bright to be members of the well-understood type of explosions known as novae, but too faint to be supernovae.

9 November 2020: A collaboration between the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) radio telescope in Europe, the Gemini North telescope, and the NASA InfraRed Telescope Facility (IRTF), both on Maunakea in Hawai‘i, has led to the first direct discovery of a cold brown dwarf from its radio wavelength emission. Along with paving the way for future brown dwarf discoveries, this result is an important step towards applying radio astronomy to the exciting field of exoplanets.

15 September 2020: For the first time, an intact, giant exoplanet has been discovered orbiting close to a white dwarf star. This discovery shows that it is possible for Jupiter-sized planets to survive their star’s demise and settle into close orbits around the remaining stellar ember, near the habitable zone. This foretells one possible future for our own Solar System when the Sun ages into a white dwarf.

25 June 2020: Astronomers have discovered the second most distant quasar ever found, using the international Gemini Observatory and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), Programs of NSF’s NOIRLab. It is also the first quasar to receive an indigenous Hawaiian name, Pōniuāʻena. The quasar contains a monster black hole, twice the mass of the black hole in the only other quasar found at the same epoch, challenging the current theories of supermassive black hole formation and growth in the early Universe.

14 April 2020: Researchers using the Gemini North telescope on Hawaiʻi’s Maunakea have detected the most energetic wind from any quasar ever measured. This outflow, which is travelling at nearly 13% of the speed of light, carries enough energy to dramatically impact star formation across an entire galaxy. The extragalactic tempest lay hidden in plain sight for 15 years before being unveiled by innovative computer modeling and new data from the international Gemini Observatory.

9 January 2019: Observations from Gemini Observatory identify a key fingerprint of an extremely distant quasar, allowing astronomers to sample light emitted from the dawn of time. Astronomers happened upon this deep glimpse into space and time thanks to an unremarkable foreground galaxy acting as a gravitational lens, which magnified the quasar’s ancient light. The Gemini observations provide critical pieces of the puzzle in confirming this object as the brightest appearing quasar so early in the history of the Universe, raising hopes that more sources like this will be found.

6 December 2017: Supermassive black holes lurk at the centers of many galaxies. While some — like the black hole at the center of our own Galaxy — live quiet lives, occasionally snacking on a star or two, others feed voraciously, consuming gas and stars and growing rapidly in mass.

6 December 2017: Observations reveal the mass of earliest known supermassive black hole which radiates from an era in the universe only 690 million years after the Big Bang. Researchers, using unique spectroscopic data from Gemini Near-Infrared Spectrograph (GNIRS) on Gemini North determined its mass at a whopping 800 million times the mass of our Sun.

18 July 2016: Gemini Observatory plays a key role in the latest harvest of over 100 confirmed exoplanets from NASA’s K2 mission, the repurposed Kepler spacecraft. Three instruments on the Gemini North telescope delivered precise images verifying many of the candidate stars as planetary system hosts. Researchers note that these systems could contain a considerable number of rocky, potentially earthlike exoplanets.

6 July 2016: As the Juno mission begins exploring Jupiter in our Solar System, scientists explore a solo world that researchers say looks more similar to Jupiter than any exoplanet yet discovered.

2 April 2014: Stellar lifetimes are measured in billions of years, so changes in their appearance rarely take place on a human timescale. Thus an opportunity to observe a star passing from one stage of life to another on a timescale of months to years is very exciting, as there are only a very few examples known. One such star is Sakurai’s Object (V4334 Sgr). First reported by a Japanese amateur astronomer in 1996 as a “nova-like object," Sakurai’s Object had been only a few years before the faint central star of a planetary nebula. In the 1990’s Sakurai’s Object brightened by a factor of 10000. This brightening has been attributed to a final helium shell flash. In this process the burned out core of the star at the center of the planetary nebula re-ignites.

29 June 2011: An international team of astronomers announced today the discovery of the most distant known supermassive black hole, seen as a luminous quasar [1] caused by gas falling into the black hole.

5 August 2009: Looking almost 11 billion years into the past, astronomers have measured the motions of stars for the first time in a very distant galaxy and clocked speeds upwards of one million miles per hour (about 1.6 million kilometers per hour), about twice the speed of our Sun through the Milky Way.

10 September 2008: Astronomers have been puzzling over the engine behind the historical 1843 outburst of Eta Carinae since it happened, but new observations with the Gemini South and the Blanco telescopes in Chile add a startling new clue.

30 May 2007: The coolest-known star-like object beyond the solar system is giving astronomers a new look at the differences between massive planets and the smallest brown dwarfs. This newly discovered object, called ULAS J0034-00 and located in the constellation Cetus, has a record-setting surface temperature of 600-700 K, cooler than any known solitary brown dwarf. In addition, it’s a relative lightweight, with an estimated mass of only 15-30 times that of Jupiter (although they both have about the same diameter).